This paper analyzes whether hospital competition is associated with improved health care delivery in China, particularly in the dimensions of health care quality and cost. We explore the differences in competition over time and across regions to examine the relationship in an environment wherein...

The preparation and characteristics of a composite phase change material (PCM) produced by incorporating polynary fatty acid eutectic mixture into sludge ceramsite were studied. According to Schröeder–Van Laar equation, five different kinds of polynary fatty acid eutectic mixture were...

In recent decades, a number of centrality metrics describing network properties of nodes have been proposed to rank the importance of nodes. In order to understand the correlations between centrality metrics and to approximate a high-complexity centrality metric by a strongly correlated...

This paper considers the process optimal strategies for an enhanced index tracking problem. The investment goals are set to achieve a higher return than the benchmark by setting the portfolio's risk profile identical to the primary index risk factors. Return differences between the index and the...

Land use and land cover (LULC) change within a watershed is recognized as an important factor affecting hydrological processes and water resources. Modeling the hydrological effects of land-use change is important not only for after-the-fact analyses, but also for understanding and predicting...

This study examines the determinants of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its implications on firms’ investment policy, organizational strategy, and performance. First, we find that firms with better performance, higher R&D intensity, better financial health, and firms in new economy...

In order to promote the common development of grain production and animal husbandry, and achieve the optimal comprehensive benefit of the entire system of grain production and the development of animal husbandry, we use the method of game theory to research the relations between grain production...

In this paper, cointegration relationships among 26 global stock market indices over the periods of sub-prime and European debt crisis and their influence rank are investigated by constructing and analyzing directed and weighted cointegration networks. The obtained results are shown as follows:...

Identifying influential spreaders is crucial for understanding and controlling spreading processes on social networks. Via assigning degree-dependent weights onto links associated with the ground node, we proposed a variant to a recent ranking algorithm named LeaderRank (Lü et al., 2011)....